Fachada

The word Fachada means Facade in English (or French). This building was or is in the Plaza Zaragoza in Valencia just off the Barrio Carmen if my memory serves me correctly. It was taken with my old Nikon Coolpix point-and-Shoot way back in 2006, I took this not because I thought then (or now) that architecturally it was interesting building more because it looked so odd and out of place amongst the Franco era 50´s and 60´s apartment blocks on either side.

When I lived there (many moons ago) the Barrio Carmen was a very vibrant community populated by artists, musicians and such like (all broke though)! I had the fortune to do a bit of fashion modeling there, which was handy as I was always short of money. (Imagine, if you can, wearing a designer suit for the winter season but being photographed in August in 38 degrees Celsius…..Hot! Though having beautiful female models hanging off your arm, was pretty fun, made up for all the heat so to speak)!

In recent years the Barrio Carmen has had Millions of Euro´s spent on it to refurbish it which is probably one of the reasons why Valencia is a city (like most) heavily in debt. My personal feeling is it was the right thing to do as it was crumbling apart and in those day´s you never knew if the car you´d parked in the street below, would have a huge chunk of masonry deeply embedded in it in the morning! The downside is: the community is gone, priced out by the rich and famous that now live there in their newly refurbished homes…the facades are in the same style but the people living within are very different. It reminds me of an old American movie from the thirties called “Deadend”. The rich live on one side of the street and the poor on the opposite side!

The Nikon was a good camera but it gave this shot the same distorted effect that my 10-24 Tamron on the Canon would give. O.K. sometimes that looks good but not always. I had to use the Correct Camera Distortion filter in PSE and having that big bright awful date stamp on your image is horrible, (I obviously forgot to disable it). O.K. if you’re a Forensic Scientist recording the scene of a crime you probably need it, for everything else, you don´t!

So loads of cropping on this one! I gave it a gloomy and grimy feel with Color Efex Pro´s filter Glamour Glow (yeah, I know Gloomy and Grimy don´t go with Glamour and Glow but what´s in a name)?

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10 thoughts on “Fachada”

I laughed when I read about the date stamp. Camera manufacturers should make sure that date stamp is always off by default. The only place for a date stamp is in the meta-data of the photo, the folder it’s stored in and possibly the filename. It has no business being in the image itself!

BTW, great story – when are you going to share the pictures from your modelling days?? 😉

Ha,Ha, Mike i was younger and better looking in those day´s, before i had a receding hairline! It´ll take awhile but ii´ll see what i can dig up,I even had an Afro once- Laughing Out Loud is not permitted on wordpress!

So many buildings and areas are being refurbished and modernised in the same way and, just as with this building, attracting a different, more affluent set of people, thus changing the entire feel of a neighbourhood. Which in some ways is okay, but I always wonder what happens to the people who were once living in these places. … The story of your modelling days is amusing!